Plastic Products Leach Chemicals That Induce In Vitro Toxicity under Realistic Use Conditions

Abstract

Plastic products contain complex mixtures of extractable chemicals that can be toxic. However, humans and wildlife will only be exposed to plastic chemicals that are released under realistic conditions. Thus, we investigated the toxicological and chemical profiles leaching into water from 24 everyday plastic products covering eight polymer types. We performed migration experiments over 10 days at 40 °C and analyzed the migrates using four in vitro bioassays and nontarget high-resolution mass spectrometry (UPLC-QTOF-MS E ). All migrates induced baseline toxicity, 22 an oxidative stress response, 13 antiandrogenicity, and one estrogenicity. Overall, between 17 and 8681 relevant chemical features were present in the migrates. In other words, between 1 and 88% of the plastic chemicals associated with one product were migrating. Further, we tentatively identified ∼8% of all detected features implying that most plastic chemicals remain unknown. While low-density polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, and polyurethane induced most toxicological endpoints, a generalization for other materials is not possible. Our results demonstrate that plastic products readily leach many more chemicals than previously known, some of which are toxic in vitro. This highlights that humans are exposed to many more plastic chemicals than currently considered in public health science and policies.

A Children’s Health Perspective on Nano- and Microplastics

“…Validated methods to interpret the huge amounts of information generated from these analyses are, in our experience, critical. Moreover, targeted and nontargeted screenings can identify substances associated with plastics, but they must be combined with toxicological data (Zimmermann et al 2020(Zimmermann et al , 2021. We recommend that bioanalytical tools, health data (ideally from prospective longitudinal cohort studies), cheminformatics, and holistic human health risk analyses should be integrated to obtain meaningful information about potential relationships between chemical signals and their toxicity for child health.…”

“…Plastic products have also been found to contain a cocktail of more than 40,000 chemicals ( Zimmermann et al. 2020 ), and certain plastics have been shown to leach over 80% of their chemicals into water, highlighting the potential for human exposure ( Zimmermann et al. 2021 ).…”

“…Emerging evidence indicates that humans are ubiquitously exposed to NMPs (Koelmans et al 2019). Plastic products have also been found to contain a cocktail of more than 40,000 chemicals (Zimmermann et al 2020), and certain plastics have been shown to leach over 80% of their chemicals into water, highlighting the potential for human exposure (Zimmermann et al 2021). As plastics degrade in the environment, they generate potentially toxic modified products.…”

Long-term durability and ecotoxicity of biocomposites in marine environments: a review

“… 161 These results indicate that particles may induce physical effects beyond chemical toxicity, even though at an order of magnitude highly exceeding environmental relevant concentrations. In an in vitro assessment from the same authors, 148 leachates from PLA showed a strong baseline toxicity, similar to leachates from PVC and polyurethane (PU), but once more at concentrations exceeding expected ones in the environment. These early assessments on the toxicity of leachates from biobased plastics indicate that even though individual additives may not be considered toxic for aquatic organisms (see Section 4, Table 1 ), complex mixtures of additives released in the environment may induce toxicity, which may be enhanced by weathering processes of the materials.…”

Computational exploration of bio-remediation solution for mixed plastic waste

“…Due to the continued availability of plastic in the open environment, weathering causes fragmentation of plastic material into microplastic, which exacerbates the problem (Verla et al ., 2019) and have become a hotspot for antibiotic-resistant microorganisms to form biofilms (Kirstein et al ., 2018; Dussud et al ., 2018; Jacquin et al ., 2019), revealing a wide range of antibiotic resistance genes of pathogenic bacteria growing on microplastics (Jacquin et al ., 2019). There are reports of contamination in every level of the food chain, including human beings (Cox et al ., 2019; Monteiro et al ., 2018; Wright & Kelly, 2017; Zhou et al ., 2020; Zimmermann et al ., 2021).…”